lunes, mayo 28, 2012

My Op-Ed for World Hunger Day

On World Hunger Day, blame should be rightly apportioned

By Carmelo Ruiz-Marrero, May 25, 2012

Monday (May 28) is World Hunger Day, and we must address rising food prices all over the planet.

Food prices rose 8 percent from December to March, the World Bank
reports. But the escalating cost of food does not affect everyone in the
same way. A typical American family spends no more than 10 percent of
its budget on food, whereas the world’s poorest 2 billion spend between
50 percent and 70 percent of their meager income on food.

There has been no shortage of explanations for the bump in food
prices: weather disasters linked to global warming, the biofuels boom,
skyrocketing oil prices and the prosperous Indian and Chinese middle
classes’ newly found taste for hamburgers.

But most commentators tend to keep pretty quiet about another very
important factor that endangers food security: financial speculation in
agricultural commodities.

Speculators deal in commodities that they neither produce nor consume.
Their profits come from futures contracts, which are essentially bets
that the price of a given commodity will rise or fall. These contracts
are themselves commodities, traded among financial institutions.

The speculator does not work in the real world economy, in which
goods and services are sold to real people, but works instead in the
finance economy, where you can get rich by buying and selling stock
without contributing anything to society. Just think of the comedy film
“Trading Places” or the anti-hero Gordon Gekko in the Oliver Stone
classic “Wall Street.”

There has always been speculation, as far back as ancient Greece. But
today it’s a whole different game. As a result of the financial
deregulation of recent years, speculation has rapidly grown to an
alarming degree. Between 2003 and 2008, investment in indexes linked to
commodities multiplied twentyfold, ballooning from $13 billion to $260
billion.

Olivier de Schutter, U.N. rapporteur on the right to food, has spoken
up more than once about the dangerous link between uncontrolled
speculation and hunger. And so have an increasing number of
organizations, including Friends of the Earth and the Institute for
Agriculture and Trade Policy.

So when it comes to taking action against world hunger, rather than
joining the aid bandwagon of Bono and Jeffrey Sachs, or embracing the
biotech crops of Monsanto and the Gates Foundation, we would be better
advised to rethink the faulty economics of so-called free markets.

None other than Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz has
repeatedly made warnings to this effect: “Neoliberal market
fundamentalism was always a political doctrine serving certain
interests. It was never supported by economic theory. Nor, it should now
be clear, is it supported by historical experience.”

The interests that this free market fundamentalism serves are not
those of the world’s hungry. They should not have to pay such a dreadful
price for it — or for their food.

Carmelo Ruiz-Marrero is a Puerto Rican author, journalist and environmental educator. He can be reached at pmproj@progressive.org.